The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard: Perceptions of Dialogue in Twelfth-Century France

Church History, Sept, 2002 by Susan R. Kramer

By Constant J. Mews. With translations By Neville Chiavaroli and Constant J. Mews. New York: St. Martin's, 1999. xvii 378 pp. $49.95.

The letters of Abelard and Heloise have attracted an audience ever since the thirteenth century, when Jean de Meun, the author of The Romance of the Rose, brought them to the attention of his readers by quoting a particularly provocative line by Heloise. While the letters shed light on a wide range of topics, it is their discussion of love that first made them famous and that has colored most subsequent interpretations. Even recent debates over the authenticity of the correspondence often put love at the heart of the dispute, questioning whether Heloise, a twelfth-century abbess with a contemporary reputation for piety, could have professed such worldly love as is expressed in her letters to Abelard.

Constant Mews's The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard brings to discussions of love and authenticity valuable insights and neglected evidence. In 1974 Ewald Konsgen published an edition of a previously unedited correspondence, Epistolae duorum amantium: Briefe Abaelards und Heloises? (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974). Although the subtitle raises the tantalizing question of the relation of these letters to the famous pair, Konsgen's chief concern was to establish a critical edition, rather than to enter a debate about the authorship of the newly discovered correspondence. For Mews, who first came upon Konsgen's edition in 1976, the authenticity of both the original correspondence and the recently published love letters is mutually reinforced by an analysis of their language and content. Mews's book does much more, however, than argue for the attribution of the two sets of letters. Combining several studies in one, Mews situates the relationship between Abelard and Heloise depicted in their exchanges of letters within the culture of the twelfth-century schools. In illuminating these texts he focuses especially on the animated discussions of love's true meaning and the parts played by Abelard and Heloise in this twelfth-century dialogue.

Mews's first chapter begins like a novel, with the tale of a young monk's discovery of a collection of love letters in the library at Clairvaux in the fifteenth century. After summarizing the contents of the letters Mews turns in his second chapter to contemporary and historical perceptions of the love affair. Here he adumbrates one of the critical themes of the book: the extent to which Heloise's letters have incorrectly been read as adhering to a secular, worldly form of love that is seen as being in opposition to the spiritual love espoused by other twelfth-century religious such as Bernard of Clairvaux and William of St. Thierry. The third chapter looks again at the relationship between Abelard and Heloise but this time examines their affair in light of the political situation in early twelfth-century France during the period of the ecclesiastical reform movements. Chapter 4 surveys twelfth-century clerical love poems and letters in order to demonstrate that a literary dialogue between a man and a woman was not a unique phenomenon in the twelfth-century and that love was a popular topic of discussion in the culture of the schools. The central focus of the fifth chapter is a comparison of the style and vocabulary of the love letters with those of other writings of Abelard and Heloise. The sixth chapter, although entitled "The Voice of Heloise," begins with an analysis of Abelard's turbulent career after the discovery of his affair with Heloise. The chapter continues a discussion begun in chapter three that relates Abelard's personal and intellectual struggles to the political climate of twelfth-century France. The final part of chapter six, which might have been better served as an a separate chapter, examines Heloise's relationship with Bernard of Clairvaux and the Cistercian order and includes two literary texts that may have been written by Heloise.

The second part of the book includes both Konsgen's Latin edition of the letters and an English translation prepared in collaboration with Neville Chiavaroli. While the philosophy of the translation was to retain the original flavor of the Latin as closely as possible, the resulting texts are nevertheless quite elegant and even moving.

The most provocative issue raised by Mews is the different understanding of love presented by Abelard and Heloise in both sets of letters. Responding to the conventional argument that Heloise presents an erotic, worldly view of love incompatible with her status as nun and abbess, Mews demonstrates that Heloise values true love as combining passion and selfless obligation, amor and dilectio. Heloise's seemingly libertine declaration that she would rather be Abelard's whore than Augustus's wife is not an invitation to sexual favors but an extension of the Cicerionian precept that true friendship has no end but itself. While Abelard and other clerical writers of the period perpetuate a distinction between love as lust and spiritual love, Heloise does not see desire as incompatible with Christian ideals of love. As Mews shows, her ideal is actually not incompatible with that of Bernard of Clairvaux. Both Bernard and Heloise share "a common concern to base ethics on an ideal of true love" (55). And Heloise, like Bernard, values the role in love played by "experience and feeling" (54).